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By Jim Boyce

While wine makers, distributors and writers tend to be the key sources for stories on the China scene, talking to the suppliers of bottles, barrels, corks and other crucial items is also revealing. I recently interviewed Amy Lee, who handles the China market — plus California, Washington, Oregon and India — for cooperage Berthomieu / Ermitage.

Lee has a decade of China experience, including stints at such as Harvest Wine International and wine importer / distributor  Montrose. I asked her about the overall market, the use of oak by winemakers here, and her own project in Oregon. She came back with some finely detailed, tightly-grained answers.

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The wine sector has seen rapid growth during the past five years, particularly the Ningxia region. What do you expect in general over the next few years and specifically for the barrel sector?

The rate of development of vineyards and wineries in Ningxia is truly mind-boggling. We’ve been visiting the area with our brands, Ermitage & Berthomieu Tonnellerie, for just a couple of years and have seen unprecedented growth. Projects such as those involving Emma Gao [Silver Heights] and Rong Jian and Li Demei [Helan Qing Xue] are truly setting a great standard for quality for the region to grow from. We’ve also begun to see some positive movements of collaboration of knowledge and talent in the area: winemakers sharing information about what works and doesn’t work as the vineyards are planted and cellars emerge.

That said, the area also has huge challenges. Not everyone is coming into this with much knowledge and we have heard stories of government officials helping specific producers or suppliers and not others. Perhaps this will change with the new administration in Beijing.

From our side with barrels, we see great opportunity for growth in the region. That said, you have to have good fruit to make good wine. Our barrels aren’t a solution for bad practices in the vineyard or the cellar. We’re looking forward to being more involved as the wine industry in China progresses and matures.

I’ve tried quite a few wines where light fruity wine was overwhelmed by oak. Have you found this? Is there a knowledge gap in China when it comes to oak use?

Absolutely. Again, you can’t make excellent wine from inferior fruit. It all starts in the vineyard. The most expensive well-made French oak barrel on the market won’t make up for what is lacking in the fruit. It can help mask those flaws, but the key is starting with well-managed vineyards, vines with some age. So many vineyards in China are very young and it takes around five years for vines to start producing fruit with interesting aromatics and flavors. It just takes time.

I agree there is a disproportionate amount of locally produced wine on the market in China that is over-oaked or not produced with the best match of oak product. Many producers are using very inexpensive oak alternative products rather than barrels, basically oak powders and chips, to give the essence of oak aromatics and flavors as well as added tannins to round out some structure in the wine, the mouth feel.

A lot of these products are the waste material from the stave mills — the factories where the whole logs are turned into the long pieces or staves that then make the barrel — or the waste material from the cooperage where the barrel is made. This can be problematic in that much of this waste material either is from part of the tree called the pith that tends to be much more bitter than the portion of the tree from which the staves for the barrels are taken, or the material is not properly seasoned — the wood for barrels is aged for a minimum of 24 months to take out bitter flavors and harsh tannins.

There is definitely a place for these products, it is just a matter of sourcing from reputable producers. The economics don’t work out to use new barrels on every wine. We have a general rule of thumb that if the wine is under USD22 (~rmb140) per bottle, it is generally not seeing any new French oak. A new French oak barrel is approximately USD1000 (~RMB6200). A new American oak barrel is approximately USD350 (~RMB2200) per barrel. The forestry practices and production methods are much different. Oak alternatives are radically less expensive.

Another challenge we see in China is the mismatching of toasts, forests and seasoning of the barrel to the wine. For example, a grape such as Sauvignon Blanc may not need any oak at all, expressing itself in a bright and fresh way through aging in stainless steel. A big tannic Cabernet Sauvignon may benefit from quite a lot of new oak in its aging process, using a more aggressively toasted barrel, tighter grained forest and longer seasoning of stave wood, bringing forward richer flavors and aromatics. and broadening and softening the palate of the wine.

We often see the misuse of toast levels, where a heavier toast barrel is used on a wine that can’t stand up to it. In the end, you are left with a wine that tastes and smells like barrel char / smoke rather than fruit. Ideally, the barrel is there to lift the fruit, add complexity in aromatics and help the wine structurally, thereby rounding and smoothing out tannins, adding mid-palate structure and adding to the length of the finish.

So much of the problem in China with misuse of oak has truly been a lack of access by winemakers here to people with much knowledge about barrels as well as a lack of options in suppliers. That is changing. Ten years ago, you could buy Radoux and Demptos. Today? You have so many options of quality barrel producers. I am happy to be a part of that new movement with Ermitage and Berthomieu. This is just the beginning of a very positive influx of suppliers for Chinese wine producers.

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